THE LAW COURTS HOTEL CASE.

Evening Star, Issue 12026, 26 October 1903, Page 2

THE LAW COURTS HOTEL CASE.

TO THE EDJTOK. Sir, —The Law Courts Hotel case certainly bristles with anomalies. Rohan is charged with being drunk; the magistrate before whom he is tried finds as a fact (he being to all intents and purposes a jury) that ho was not drunk. That, therefore, 'is res judicata, Rohan was not drunk, and it is not open to &nyone to go behind the acquittal and say that he ought to have been convicted; and no one can write or say that Rohan was drunk without laying himself open to an action for Libel or slander (and very properly so, too), for what is the use of trial if the verdict is to be open to question? And yet, knowing this, another magistrate allows evidence to show that Rohan was what a competent cauit has already said he was not!* I am not a practical lawyer, although I have studied law, anl therefore I am-prob-ably wrong; but it does seem to me thai such evidence should not have been allowed, and that Rohan's acquittal was a complete answer to the charge against Mrs Shearer. Bui, in anv case, whether I am right or wrong in this view, there can be no two opinions as to the injustice of Mr Carew's refusal to allow an appeal Given two adverse verdicts in courts of equal jurisdiction, an appeal to a higher court seems the natural step to take, ilr Carew expresses himself satisfied with the justice of his own decision, but he may rest assured that itsatisfies no one else's sense of justice, and self-satisfaction is not always wisdom.—l am, etc., B.CLJL October 26.